Earth Day Thoughts: Empower Individual Pro-Environmental Effort
Earth day is this Friday! One of my favorite days of the year as my hope that we and our Earth will be ok is renewed as I see the widespread enthusiasm and love for our planet. The truth is, every day we should appreciate everything our environment gives us, though understand that not even everyone has these privileges we take for granted: clean air and water, food, and security. I wanted to write about how we might help the Earth and how in turn we will help each other by offering that understanding our past will inform our future vis a vis how we respond and mitigate climate change.
The consequential scale of climate change is almost impossible to comprehend. It feels as if we environmentalists are beating a dead horses when it comes to alarming people to take urgent action given the current and impeding degradation, some of which is irreversible. The content itself is inherently sensationalized yet I think after years of the same messaging we’ve become calloused to what is and what will be happening. Of the many alarming infographic, charts, and pictures I could display I think you could look no farther than the the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide and its direct correlation to rising global surface and ocean temperatures. You could analyze the melting of the polar caps over the past five decades and be shocked to see that the North Pole has lost nearly a third of its ice into the Atlantic.
Thanks to many efforts from prominent environmentalist such as Rachael Carson, Aldo Leopold, Wangari Maathai, Bill Gates, and Greta Thurnberg great good for the environment has been achieved. This can be and is substantiated, supplemented, and compounded by the actions of environmentalist, individually and collectively on specifically local scales.
I think our individual effort to combat change begins with understanding our individual role as a consumer and creator. God has given us the ingenuity and talent to create and innovate and this must be harnessed to save his world in which everything he created he qualified as good. Our stewardship should reflect that. We, wether we are electricians, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and professions one might not immediately associate with the environment must do our part in our context to be saving our planet. Because the individual efforts, though seemingly negligible like proper recycling, compound. This our planet, it was given to us by God, and we must be accountable in stewarding it back to health.
First I’ll pose a question: how are environmentalist, such as the scientists, activists, and professors, or those deeply educated on the environment such as indigenous peoples or enthusiasts of nature, combating climate change? Where do they begin?
One might be safe in assuming that environmental solutions, ones that have profound impacts, have yet to be even created. Consequently, all our efforts should be poured into financing, promoting, and demanding governmental support of these technological innovations which will save our planet. The scale of these innovations ranges globally and across every industrial sector and in every community.
Kenyan environmental activist and Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Maathai’s last chapter of her memoir says within the theme that I’d qualify as “looking back to move forward”. She turns to the past practices of her ancestors in Kenya and how they interacted with the environment as inspiration for her and her people today even in their different context can do to solve climate change. This mean s reimplementing agricultural technique that conserved rain or a variety of other behaviors, such as minimal amounts of consumption and thus pollutions, which influence the creation of a healthy environmental community. Solutions, aren’t inherently limited to future innovation, perhaps they already exist and need to be rediscovered by reimplementing previous technologies that one’s ancestors created and effectively used to conserve. I use Wangari Maathai as a case in point.
I also think this notion of looking back to move forward applies to morality as much as it does to environmental solutions. Take the current climate of spirituality and its ever evolving nature of pluralistic fusions of, in the case of New Age minimalism or spirituality, the blends of yoga, zen, and eastern religion. While I certainly support any spiritual activities or process which brings one closer to God and closer to one’s neighbors I propose that again we take the same principle of understanding, at least in context of western society and culture, where our morals and ethics originated from: the judeo-christian values sourced in the Biblical poems, narratives, and books. One might argue that even The Torah and its sub divisions of poetry, mythology, and conquest narrative is a pluralistic blend drawing on several faith traditions and I might agree. I argue though that one does not need to drift to much farther from the Bible to achieve the same essence of spirituality that other forms might or might not deliver. Just something to think about.
